


Day 27. Chop

by Munnin



Series: Fictober [27]
Category: Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-07 21:13:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16416062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Munnin/pseuds/Munnin
Summary: It's time to get as far from the Core as possible and Swan has a plan.





	Day 27. Chop

**Author's Note:**

> If you’re just joining in, I urge you to read the [whole series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1145777) from the beginning as we're nearing the end where all the threads come together.

Swan closed the door behind himself, not daring to breathe till the lock clicked home. 

He believed Captain Fordo. Believed that the clone would track him down if he was told to. He also believed that if he did, it would just be business. 

He moved to the fresher, shedding his clothes as he went. There was blood on everything, splattered and metallic, like a taste in the back of his throat more than a smell.

The thought alone made him gag. 

Savric Ishsha, the composer, had been everything he’d expected. Neat and self-contained but with that edge of heartbreak, that honesty Swan had felt in his code. Swan had never felt attraction to someone because of their outsides, their appearance. What mattered to him was deeper, richer. Something you couldn’t know about a person in a glance. Something you had to find, to learn.

And he had found it in the composer, in Savric. 

And for that one moment when their eyes met, Swan knew Savric had felt it too. 

And then…

And then it was too late. 

The past had come back to poison him again. Atar, like a monster from a story, rising up to stain everything. 

Swan stared at himself in the mirror, seeing none of the beauty others saw. He saw only the stains of brutality. Blood on his cheek, bruises forming where Fordo had knocked him down to save his life. Heavy purple shadows under his eyes. There was blood on his crest too, the tips of the white feathers stained red. He knew it wouldn’t come out, no matter how he washed them. Better to shave them all off and let them grow back clean.

But that would mean letting Savric go. Cutting off the last physical trace. And he wasn’t sure he wanted that. 

He stepped into the water fresher, almost forgetting to trick the meter into ignoring the time limits, and ran it as hot as he could bear. He curled up in the base of the fresher and let it wash away the stains, tears and blood. All of it. 

An hour before Coruscant filtered dawn reached his level, Swan was ready to go. The apartment was scrubbed, both physically and digitally. There would be no record he was ever there, except in the memory of Fordo’s team. Swan was fairly sure they wouldn’t tell Atar where to look for him.

Atar might be locked up. He might be executed for his crimes. But he just as easily might escape, or talk his way out. Or any one of a thousand other things that could go wrong. 

Swan knew he wasn’t- _couldn’t_ be safe. Not on the same world as Atar. Not even in the same system.

It was time to go.

He was packing the few things that mattered to him. A change of clothes, his song-steel flute, his slicing deck. An alert chimed and he tapped the data-pad at his wrist. A dump of files downloaded into his holo-address. No name, no return address, just a single line of code as a message. The refrain of a melody from Savric’s tone poem. Savric had bequeathed all of his codes, all of his personal files to Swan. 

There wasn’t time to decode them, not yet. Wherever Swan ended up, he’d make time to read them, to get to know the composer. To remember him. 

Swan headed for the docks, flat cap pulled down over his feathered crest. The Pantoran tattoos painted on his cheeks and hands would be enough to fool anyone who wasn’t Pantoran. He walked up to one of the larger cruise liner companies and gave the almost universal sign for _looking for work_. 

A human at the desk looked him up and down briefly then went back to his paperwork. “What do you do?”

“Musician. Flute.” Swan answered, careful to affect the Pantoran lilt. 

“Worked cruise before?” 

“First time. Sir.” Swan shook his head but it was a lie. 

He’d done this several times before and knew the tricks to it. He’d chosen a cruise liner that catered almost exclusively to humans, one that hired non-humans for their novelty value, or their looks. A liner that treated, and paid, their staff like indentured servants. A cruise where the passengers would be wealthy and arrogant, the sort who forgot a crew member’s face the second they looked away. The high turn-over of crew meant he’d be able to pass under any identity he chose and no-one would know him to call him out. 

It was the cheapest and most anonymous way to get from one place to another without being packed into a cargo hauler as freight. 

The human huffed and pulled up a manifest. “We’ve got room for an entertainer. Sign your chop here.” He shoved a flickering datapad Swan’s way.

Swan entered his ident-chip and pressed his thumb to the screen. The slice-code in the fake ident-chip would erase his thumbprint and overwrite it with another. Nothing would link Swan Le to the Pantoran lounge musician. Just another mask. 

The human took the screen back, seeing nothing amiss as Swan’s code wormed its way into the liner company’s systems, leaving back doors as it went. “Good. Head for C deck, the protocol droid’ll get you squared away in the crew bunk.”

Swan would not be sharing a bunk. Somehow the system would never get around to assigning him a bunkmate. His journey would be quiet - playing uninteresting background music in one of the liner’s dining halls, maybe a bit of backing music for one of the house bands. He’d be anonymous, forgettable. 

Swan would spend the trip skimming ident info and credit codes from the passengers. Picking up whatever interesting secrets he could access without bring attention to himself. He’d wait for a world that felt right, stepping off for shore-leave and never been seen again. 

It wasn’t a great living, but it was a safe way to travel. And it would give him time to get to know Savric better. If only in his mind.

***

Somewhere between Coruscant and the penal colony of Esperance IV, an airlock on the prisoner transport shuttle malfunctioned. An Iktotchi prisoner was flushed into space, dying a brutal death in the vacuum. 

In an office on Raxus, Count Dooku read the report on the holo-news, mentally ticking off a loose end. 

Ventress had failed him. Again. She should have killed that pathetic Induparan before he’d reached the senator. Before he got somewhere she was too well known to be able to infiltrate. The Iktotchi was a brute; a blunt instrument where a sharp blade should have sufficed. Still, it was done. And the brute knew nothing that could connect the assassination back to the Separatists. Not in any concrete way. But he was still a loose end in the hands of the Republic and a nuisance. 

The anonymous slicer who had taken the contract however, had been neat and efficient, and had left no trace of tampering in the Republic system. No trace in any system, in fact. Including Dooku’s. Even the Banking Clan records of the payment had vanished. 

Dooku made a note to find out who this slicer was, if he could. Someone like that might be useful in the future.

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to Josh.


End file.
